It's a scream that nobody hears. It's the scream of a baby
being butchered or being scalded to death with a saline solution inside
its mother's womb. Here in the U.S.A., with nearly fifty million such
babies already done to death within the past thirty five years, the
massive slaughter of the innocent unborn has seemingly become a
non-issue, or at best an issue that is acknowledged but which, for a
majority of Americans, is simply shrugged off. "You've got a problem
with that? Well, that's YOUR problem! We're concerned with the REAL
problem: What to do about the ECONOMY!" And if thanks to voters'
unconcern, FOCA (the "Freedom of Choice Act") becomes the law of the
land, as one of the candidates for high office has pledged that, should
he be elected, so it will be, to those fifty million missing will be
added tens of millions MORE before another generation has passed. For
FOCA mean "NO
restrictions of ANY
kind for abortion on DEMAND!"
But if far too many voters are turning a deaf ear and a
deaf conscience to the screams of the defenseless, there is One Who hears
those screams, and they call forth His wrath! As indeed we were
reminded last Sunday in the passage from the Book of Exodus: "Thus says
the Lord: You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. IF EVER YOU WRONG THEM,
AND THEY CRY OUT TO ME, I WILL SURELY HEAR THEIR CRY! MY WRATH
WILL FLARE UP, AND I WILL SLAY YOU WITH THE SWORD...." Exodus
22:2 1. And the Book of Proverbs adds the warning that AMONG THE THINGS THAT
GOD MOST DETESTS, THAT HE FINDS TO BE "AN ABOMINATION," ARE "HANDS THAT
SHED INNOCENT BLOOD." (Proverbs 6:17) In this context Americans
would do well to remember the words of Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my
country when I recall that God is JUST". words prompted by a
conscience uneasy at his own and at so many of his countrymen's denying
to fellow human beings the unalienable right to
liberty with which, as he himself had written, all men have been
endowed by their Creator. These words of Jefferson apply with even
greater force today to those who by active connivance or simply by
passive indifference would deny to innocent millions their fundamental
right to LIFE! How long, one may reasonably ask, will God WITHHOLD His
wrath? Though it well may be that the chastisement He inflicts
upon us will take the form not of direct intervention but of simply allowing us to
pull the roof down upon our own heads through the consequences of the
choices we have made. It's no great challenge to the imagination
to conjecture that in the not too distant future fifty million
additional Americans could make all the difference
between our nation's survival and its demise. Could not even
less than half that number produce an impressive number of combat divisions?
And those fifty million missing Americans will surely have included a multitude of minds
gifted with the insight or the genius to make a significant
contribution to the solution of our nation's problems. We are as
impoverished by their absence as we would have been enriched by the
power of their minds. And to state the matter baldly, even crudely,
those fifty million Americans, had they been allowed to live, would be energizing our
economy today as much with their productive skills and presumable
dedication as with their need for food, clothing, housing, education
and transportation. Aren't we being told, after all, that a big
part of our current economic problem is the mismatch between an excess of housing
and a shortage of buyers? Though admitting that is not to
let Congress off the hook. ACORN's powerful friends in CONGRESS successfully
opposed
at least two major appeals from the current administration to set up a
regulatory authority with powers sufficient to have reined in Fannie
Mae's and Freddie Mac's extravagant urging our lending institutions to
offer hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to high-risk borrowers.
It was in fact the policy of Congress, for political advantage, to do
all that it could to
promote such extravagance on the part of Freddie Mac and Fannie
Mae.
Well, the election is upon us, and FOCA may well become
the law of the land, Heaven help us! And the very same people who have
precipitated our economic crisis may well be tasked by the voters with
finding a solution, Que sera sera! But
an outrageous
insult offered to America's believing Christians by comedian and
would-be Senator Al Franken calls for-but will probably not
elicit-an apology no matter how the election goes. Mr. Franken has
apologized to his own political party for his one-liners about rape and
oral sex, but he has to date offered no apology whatsoever for his
persistent public mockery of the Christian religion and of the Catholic
Faith in particular. May I quote from a respected local commentator
Katherine Kersten, writing in the Star
Tribune for October 22nd. The occasional long dashes in
rendering the language of Mr. Franken are a replacement for his actual
choice of words, language so obscene and scatoiogicai as to be unfit
for direct citation here.

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Vulgar Mockery of
Christians: Is This What We Want in a U.S. Senator?
By: Katherine Kersten, in the Star Tribune of October 22, 2008 ...
[would-be Senator] Franken finds Christ's crucifixion to be a barrel of
laughs. For example, in his 1999 book Why Not Me? he
wrote about his discovery-as
a fictional
former president ... of "the complete skeleton
of Jesus Christ still nailed to the cross" during an
archeological dig. At the Franken Presidential Library gift shop,
visitors can buy "small pieces of Jesus' skeleton."

"We
would like to display Jesus' skeleton at some future point," Franken
went on, "It's merely a matter of designing and building an
exhibition space... . Until then he's very
comfortable in a box down in a basement near the geothermal power
station.

Very
funny. Anybody want to try ajoke like that about Mohammed?....

In
Franken's world, God has a mouth as foul as Franken's. In one
book, he has God refer to books about liberal media bias as _________.
Later, he describes God as having _____________.

But
Franken saves his sharpest barbs for those weirdos, Catholics.

In
2006, he and a guest on his Air America radio show joked about
Eucharistic communion wafers-sacred to Catholics as the body of Christ
- and compared them to chips and guacamole. In "Dog Confessional," a
proposed sketch for Saturday Night Live, Franken depicted "a series of
dogs, played by cast members, confessing to a priest, " according to
the Washington Post. NBC refused to air it.

In another book, Franken described greeting a New York
audience with the words: "Isn't Cardinal O'Connor an _________?"

Franken's campaign did not return a phone call seeking
comment.

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A front-page article
in another edition of The Star
Tribune (October 25, 2008), complete with color photograph, gave
dramatic illustration to what medical science is able to do today to help rather than
to harm an
unborn child. The photo, showing two proud parents holding their
new-bom twin sons, added emotional impact to a report on a procedure
that enabled the twins to escape certain consequences which would
otherwise have befallen them if an ingenious new surgical technique had
not been employed. And please note, if you will, the surgeon's 'Use of
the word BABIES
to describe the pre-natal
twins (instead of the P.C.- mandated and cleiloerateiy dehumnanizing
term fetuses).
May I share the Star Tribune
report with you here.

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Minneapolis
Doctors Are Now Able to Repair a Rare Problem in Pregnancy.
By Josephine Marcotty, October 25, 2008

When Gavin and Owen Cassellius were bom Wednesday morning
at Abbot Northwestern Hospital four anxious adults
heaved a sign of relief. Their parents, of course. But also the two
doctors who had used a minuscule camera and laser to repair tiny blood
vessels in their shared placenta months earlier-fixing an abnormality
that likely would have killed one or both of them.

Doctors
at Children's Hospital and Abbott Northwestern in Minneapolis are the
first in Minnesota to offer the still experimental surgery. It
means that there is a new and far better option for the 40 to 50 sets
of parents in Minnesota who each year find that their identical fetuses
have the
abnormality known as Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome. Before,
they had to travel to another state for the surgery, risking
neurological damage to the babies if they survived--or terminate the
pregnancy.

The twins' parents, Jeana and Jeff Cassellius, said that,
presented with those options last July, they knew instantly that the
procedure, though still risky, was by far the best choice. It gave them
an 80 percent
chance of taking at least one baby home.

"We
could take control of it," said Jeff Cassellius, 25, of
Roberts, Wisconsin. Even if things didn't go well, they could face life
without "woulda, shoulda, or coulda. " Now, he said, as he
suddenly teared up in front of a wall of cameras at a hospital news
conference Friday, nothing would stop them from taking their sons home.

The
syndrome occurs in 10 to 15 percent of identical twin pregnancies. One
twin receives too little blood through the shared blood vessels of
their placenta, the other too much. Left uncorrected, the uneven flow
of blood starves one twin and damages the heart of the other. The
mother is also at risk because the abnormality creates too much
amniotic fluid triggering bleeding and early contractions.

That's how Jeana Cassellius, 26, learned something was wrong.

Late last June, when she was 19 weeks pregnant, her doctor
told her she was carrying twins. A week later she started bleeding ....
Her doctors in Hudson, Wisconsin sent her to Abbott, where an
ultrasound showed that one baby was too big,
the other too small.

Dr.
Brad Feltis, a perinatal specialist at Abbott, said they had several
choices. They could do nothing, risking miscarriage or severely
disabled babies. Doctors
could periodically remove some of the excess fluid, reducing
pressure inside the womb. That still left a high-chance of miscarriage
or long-term disablilt.

Or
they could try the surgery.

Dr.
Feltis and Dr. William Block, a pediatric surgeon at Children's
Hospital, learned the procedure in Belgium this year. It's
done more often in Europe, but increasing in frequency in the United
States. About 10 pediatric hospitals offer it now.

Feltis and Block said they were frustrated by having to
send patients elsewhere. Sometimes parents chose to end their
pregnancies.

"We thought we needed to provide it here," said Feltis.

Within a week of the diagnosis Jeana Cassellius was on a
table in a brightly lit operating room at Abbott. When nurses asked her
if she wanted to watch the procedure on overhead monitors, she said:
"No way!"....

Block
inserted a tiny camera into her uterus. He used it to navigate through
her womb to the placenta, where he could see the blood
vessels that fed each of the umbilical cords. He found seven that were
abnormal. Using a laser attached to the camera, he destroyed the blood
vessels by cauterizing them. Some were the width of a
toothpick, some the width of a human hair.

In all it took about an hour and a half, he said.

"It's
challenging," he said. "The babies are tumbling around in the amniotic
sac. One frequently gets in our way, and we have to nudge it aside. "

So
far the doctors have dome about six of the procedures at Abbott. When
the Cassellius babies were born healthy and nearly full term, they
decided it was time to go public with it.

Not
all their cases have ended as well as the Cassellius'. They said
that so far they're on track with the outcomes of other hospitals that
do the procedure: Both
twins survive about 76 percent of the time. One twin survives about 80
percent of the time. About 8 percent develop long-term mental
handicaps.

But
babies Gavin and Owen are doing fine. At this point their
parents can tell them apart by names on their hats.

Later, when they get home, they'll try a different
technique.

"Nail polish
on their toes," Jeff Cassellius said.

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Our congratulations to Doctors Block and Feltis and to Jeff and Jeana
Cassellius! In stark contrast with those who visit a
murder-house, aka an abortion clinic, Jeff and Jeana could bring their
living babies home!